


Trebuchet MS

by Tricochet



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Blind Date, Fake Dating, M/M, Meet-Cute, Mutual Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-18
Updated: 2018-05-18
Packaged: 2019-05-08 11:13:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14693025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tricochet/pseuds/Tricochet
Summary: James and Winn aren't very enthusiastic about the date their friends arranged for them, but they hatch a plan to keep their friends from setting them up on other dates.





	Trebuchet MS

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Fake It Till You Make It](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3600837) by [74days](https://archiveofourown.org/users/74days/pseuds/74days). 



> I found the inspiration for this fic looking through random fics in the meet-cute tag! Find the inspiration fic in the related works. It's really fun to read, and I've never even watched the canon it's from.

“I told you, Kara. I don’t need you setting me up!” Winn insists.

Kara looks at him skeptically. “How many hours is it you’ve spent watching sci-fi movies this week?”

“Seventeen, but-”

“And how many boxes of tissues and soda each have you gone through?”

Winn winces. “You have a point, but I’m okay! I swear!”

“This guy is really nice,” Kara promises. “My cousin knows him. He’s tall, and handsome, and he works in newspaper photography.”

“Yeah, he sounds wonderful and absolutely not my type. We both know I only go for trashbags.”

“I know that too well, and I’m trying to change it. You’ve had a bad streak with what’s-her-name, uh, Siobhan, then Lyra, then Mike. But James is just who you need to snap out of it.”

“‘James’,” Winn scoffs. “What a do-gooder, handsome name. I bet he has, like, a collection of ties and volunteers at an animal shelter. Kara, you gotta stop setting me up. I just want to wear pajamas and sleep. I don’t want to go outside and get dressed and see other people.”

 

“Put on a nice shirt,” Clark says. James sits up with a groan. 

“I just went on a date!”

“Meeting up with your ex to discuss who gets what share of your cereal box is not a date. Look, I have a picture of this guy! Isn’t he handsome?”

James stares at the picture of the smiling man with tousled hair and a grin. 

“I guess. He’s not really my type, though. He looks kind of like a nerd. I don’t like short dudes.”

“Just try,” Clark says. “It won’t hurt.”

James groans. “Fine. This is the last time, though.”

 

 

Winn sits down at the table after hours of dread. He still worries about his hair every time he meets a new person, no matter how many dates he goes on. His date is already there, looking no more happy than Winn feels. James smiles when he sees Winn, but Winn gets a feeling that it’s forced. James is kind of cute, but even his skinny tie is adjusted perfectly.

Winn doesn’t even introduce himself before he starts talking. “Hi, so I’m guessing you don’t want to be here either. A friend set you up?”

James nods. “No offense, but you aren’t really my type. My friend hasn’t stopped setting me up since my ex and I broke up. I’d really rather be at home with my television.”

“Yeah, I have an idea. Just so they stop trying to set us up with other people for a while, we can say we’re going on dates while we’re actually at home resting. I can watch movies and you can iron your ties or whatever it is you do on weekends.”

“That sounds like a plan,” James tells him. “Let’s eat and leave. I’ll give you my phone number so we can coordinate our stories.”

 

“How was your date?” Clark teases James. 

James nods and smiles. “It was good.”

“What was he like? What did you talk about?”

James opens his mouth, then thinks of what to say without being dishonest. “We didn’t do that much talking.”

Clark guffaws. “You devil, you! I knew it! You had sex with him!” He slaps James playfully on the arm. 

James nods, trying to make himself look more rougeish. He doesn’t think it’s working. He omits the information that he and Winn had each devoured their meals and then went their separate ways. Not that Winn isn’t cute, but he’s not James’s type. He’s more of a technical person than James is used to, and James really needs a break from dating short people.

He sends a quick text to Winn. 

“So Clark thinks we fucked.”

“Yeah, so does Kara. She’s so proud of me for getting laid. Almost wished I’d actually done it,” Winn responds. 

“Ooh, are you texting him?” Clark says, trying to look at James’s phone and interrupting him from wishing the same thing as Winn. 

“No,” James lies. He expects Clark to see right through it, and Clark grins. 

“Let me see!”

“No!”

“Is it dirty?”

“No!”

Clark shakes his head. “Whatever you say.”

“I’m seeing him again tomorrow,” James blurts out. “At his place.”

Clark gives him a wink and a high-five.

 

 

Winn opens his door. 

“Hi, sorry about this,” James says. “I just told Clark I’d be coming over today, and I wanted to make it seem realistic. You can just watch TV, and I’ll do my own thing. Just make it seem like we’re spending time together.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I was going to work on developing some photos for an animal shelter I volunteer at. I take their pictures so they can get adopted more quickly.”

Winn tries to stop the images of James cuddling with a dog from entering his head. For some reason, James is shirtless in his imagination. He can’t believe this guy. He’s a handsome, tall, sweet guy who volunteers at an animal shelter and is absolutely not Winn’s type. He’s far too perfect. From what Winn can see under his shirt, he must work out too. And even if James was Winn’s type, James had made it pretty clear that Winn wasn’t his. 

Winn shakes his head and reminds himself that he and James are not actually dating, nor does he want them to be. No matter how handsome James’s smile is or how good those ties look, Winn is a man on a mission, and his mission is to reclaim his weekends. 

 

James can’t believe Winn convinced him to go to a science exhibition. James is smart enough to turn a computer on and use any type of photo editor, but as soon as Winn starts talking about code, James just smiles and nods along. 

“Look at this,” Winn says excitedly. James stares at the setup of cables and screens. Winn seems to know what to do with it. A robot rolls over to them. Winn makes it move in circles around James.

“That’s so cute!” James says. 

“Yeah. Can we go to my coworkers’ exhibit?”

James follows Winn to where a dark-haired woman is standing by some sort of energy panel. 

The woman hugs Winn. 

“James, this is my coworker Lena. Lena, meet my boyfriend, James,” Winn says. James raises an eyebrow but shakes Lena’s hand. 

“Could I have an interview with you, Ms. Luthor?” another woman asks. James recognizes her as Winn’s best friend and Clark’s cousin. 

“Anything for you, Kara,” Lena says. She says goodbye to Winn and James. 

“Lena’s the reason Kara wanted to set me up. She feels bad about ditching me to date my coworker,” Winn whispers. 

James stops himself from laughing. He follows Winn to ask about the augmented reality display he sees. 

 

 

Winn stands by the drinks and watches James pose next to his photographs and talk to a client. He looks even more handsome than usual with his nicest tie. 

Someone taps him on the shoulder and Winn jumps. 

“Whoa, whoa, it’s just me,” Clark Kent says. 

“Oh. Hi,” Winn says. 

“You must be James’s new boyfriend. I was one of the masterminds who set you two up.”

Winn nods. “Yeah, I’m Winn. Thank you for that, by the way.”

“Anything to make Jimmy happy,” Clark says. His smile is so shiny that Winn can feel the headache coming on. “I showed up to surprise him.”

Winn looks at the ground, trying not to think about every sexual thing James must have told Clark they did. 

“That’s so nice of you.”

“Well, I’m guessing that that’s the same thing you did,” Clark tells him. 

“Yeah,” Winn admits. “I’m waiting until he’s not talking to someone who looks rich before I embarrass him.”

“Considerate,” Clark laughs, and Winn almost wishes that he was James’s real boyfriend. 

 

“So, Kara wants to go on a double date with us,” Winn says. 

“What if she realizes?” James wonders, pausing the sci-fi movie he’d agreed to watch with Winn as another fake-date.

“We have to make sure that doesn’t happen. As far as she knows, we have been on twelve dates over the course of two months and engaged in sexual intercourse on seven separate occasions. We really should know more about each other. I’ve prepared a handy chart of things we have to learn. I’ll need you to fill this out.”

Winn sets a paper on the table next to them and pulls two pens from his breast pocket. James looks down at the spreadsheet, then back up to Winn’s scrunched-up face. He’s concentrating on the paper, so intensely that he doesn’t even see James’s fond smile. 

James looks through the list. He already knows most of them just from the ‘practice dates’ they’ve spent together. “Uh, favorite movie sounds fine, but some of them are a little…”

Winn crosses ‘preferred sexual position’ across the list. 

“Okay. I’ll cross that question off. Until then, we need to practice answering like it’s natural.”

“It won’t be an interview!” James objects, but he’s smiling. “I don’t need to know your family history!” 

Winn is concentrating again, and James looks at his tousled hair and adorable smile. He has to remind himself that Winn isn’t his type. He’s funny and attractive in a nerdy, sweater-vest kind of way, but he just isn’t James’s type. 

 

 

Winn opens his door again. James hands him a flower. 

“Thank you, baby,” Winn says. James mock-salutes like a true gentleman. A very handsome gentleman with a shirt that Winn can see all of his muscles through. Not that he’s Winn’s type. 

“You ready to hold hands and pretend to be a couple?” James asks.

Winn tries not to wince at ‘pretend’. “Yeah. Remember what’s at stake here. If we fail, we’ll lose our freedom to Friday nights and unregulated ice cream consumption.” He doesn’t mention that most of his Friday nights have been spent with James anyway. 

James nods. “What if they expect us to kiss?”

“Then we just… kiss, I guess,” Winn says. 

James nods. “Okay. I can do that. Just like a peck, right?”

“No, I’m going to French you in front of the whole restaurant,” Winn deadpans. “Defile your mouth with my tongue.”

James raises an eyebrow and snorts a little. “Okay, then.”

 

James watches Winn talk. His eyes are glowing with enthusiasm. James had almost panicked as soon as he saw Winn in that adorable striped cardigan, and he hasn’t gotten any less flustered since they’ve been at the restaurant. Lena makes eye contact with James and smiles. He grins back and looks over at Winn. Winn’s hair is combed dorkily, and his cardigan looks ridiculous

“James,” Kara is saying. “Earth to James, can you hear me? Lena’s covering the check.”

“Oh, uh, thanks,” James says, only half-aware of anything except Winn. 

They stand up, and Lena and Kara say goodbye to them. 

“You and Winn are such a cute couple,” Lena tells James. “I can tell how totally smitten you both are.”

James feels himself turn a little redder as Kara and Lena get into a car. He puts his arm around Winn and impulsively pulls him into a kiss. Kara whistles as she drives away. James doesn’t take his eyes or his lips off Winn. Winn is responsive, wrapping one hand around James’s back and setting the other on the side of James’s face. 

 

 

Winn keeps kissing James, long after Kara and Lena are gone. His hand rests on James’s back, where he can feel the muscles under his shirt. When he pulls back, he looks at James. 

“That wasn’t fake, was it?” Winn asks. 

“Uh, no. Not on my part, anyway,” James says. Winn notices how red he’s turned. 

“Okay, good. I wasn’t faking it either. I heard Lena talking about how in love we were, and it just clicked, you know?”

“Can we declare this the real first date?”

“I would love to, Mr. Olsen. And, you know, seeing as we already told our friends that we hooked up after the first date…”

“Are you looking to make that a reality?”

Winn smirks. “If we want to keep the charade up.”

 

James rolls to the other side of Winn’s bed to take a slurp of water. Winn’s hair is even more messed up than usual. 

“You know, if Kara ever finds out that we weren’t together until now, she’d gloat even more than when I first told her,” Winn says. 

“We’d never hear the end of it,” James agrees. 

“I told Kara you weren’t my type because you were, like, too perfect, and I’d only ever dated garbage. She was so smug when I told her it worked out.”

“So was Clark. He told me he knows my type better than I do.”

“Yeah. Kara says Mike was Comic Sans and you’re Trebuchet MS. Apparently they’re the same sans-serif font family, but you are just better in every possible way.”

James stretches and rolls back to Winn. “I can’t believe I didn’t want to go on a date with you.”

“Neither can I. I thought it’d be mutually miserable. Instead, we all won.”

“It worked out better than I could have thought,” James agrees.

**Author's Note:**

> hjhfdshdsksdfd this is the last Scholsen fic I have planned for a while, mainly because canon is ... not doing so well at the moment, so I'll probably be back to posting AvaLance spy AU or some other meet-cutes.


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